Recent cooking exploits

I am a terrible food blogger.  Not because I don't post very often (though I don't), or because my recipes are awful (I don't post the awful ones!), or because my writing is dreadful (I like to think it's ok, most of the time, and at least I can spell and use correct grammar), but because I always forget to take photos.  By the time I have chopped, cooked, prepared and served, I'm usually too hungry (or my guests are!) to remember to get the camera out.  And then I think of doing a blog post about my cooking adventures, and then I think "If only I'd taken a photo!".  And then I don't post after all.

But since the point of this blog was partly to record recipes for my own use, I figure I may as well put them down, even if there are no pretty pictures to whet the appetite.

A couple of weeks ago I had friends round for the evening and decided to do a tapas-style spread with a variety of dishes and platters for everyone to pick at.  One of my favourite restaurants in Manchester is Dimitri's, which sounds Greek but describes itself as a "tapas taverna"; and one of the dishes we often have there is chorizos bravas -- like patatas bravas but with added chorizo.  Inspired by this, I set out to make my own version. 

I wanted something more tomatoey and less oily, so this is more like a chorizo and potato stew than real patatas bravas, which never have enough of the tomato sauce for my liking.  Far from the source it may be, but this came out so well I felt I should write it down for next time.  Another thing I liked is that the proportions came out perfectly using whole packs of things -- no little bits or half-packets left over!

Spicy chorizo and potato stew
1kg new/salad potatoes
2 x 170g spicy chorizo rings, cut into 1cm slices
2 red onions, roughly chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed/finely chopped
2 capsicums (peppers) - whatever colour, mixed is good - roughly chopped
1/2 cup red wine
1 cup prepared tomato sauce (we had half a jar of Dolmio in the fridge; using a can of crushed tomatoes and adding extra seasoning would probably work just fine)
freshly ground black pepper
squeeze of fresh lemon
couple of handfuls sliced spring onion

Boil potatoes whole for about 10 minutes, until tender but not squishy.  Let cool, then slice thickly (about 1.5cm slices).
Heat heavy-based pan on medium and fry chorizo slices on both sides until browned; remove from pan.  Add onions, garlic and capsicum to pan and fry (in oil released from chorizo) for a few minutes, until slightly softened.  Add potato slices and cook for a few minutes each side until slightly browned.  Return chorizo to pan, add wine and tomato sauce/tomatoes, season with freshly ground black pepper, cook about 10 minutes until sauce is slightly thickened.  Add an extra grinding of pepper, a squeeze of lemon and sliced spring onions, and serve with crusty bread.

(Next time I make this I will probably add one or two sliced red chillies along with the onion, peppers and garlic; the chorizo wasn't really spicy enough for my taste.)

The first BBQ of the year, and a non-BBQ recipe

We're enjoying a spate of perfect BBQ weather in Manchester this month -- weekends are fine, sunny and sometimes even warm!  But only sometimes; this is England, after all.  As long as we don't get over-optimistic with our clothing choices, then, it's a great time to get in some of the al fresco eating to which everyone seems to aspire.  (On occasion at the expense of common sense, I may add; Melburnians in particular have a dogged obsession with street cafes and outdoor dining no matter what the weather, which leads to a proliferation of those gas-burner braziers surrounded by tables of freezing-but-determined customers huddled in their winter coats -- black, of course -- and clutching their hands around their espresso cups to keep warm -- but I digress...)

My friend J and I took advantage of yesterday's weather by carrying his dining table and chairs out onto the back lawn, sitting there all afternoon playing Settlers and, of course, firing up the BBQ for some late lunch / early dinner at around 4pm.  (Why, by the way, isn't there a word like brunch for the afternoon equivalent?  I have often wondered this...)  As J pointed out, one of the nice things about BBQs is that you can have all sorts of things at once in the same meal that you'd never normally dream of eating together (unless, I suppose, you are one of those people in the habit of ordering the combination special chow mein at the local Chinese), like beef (burgers), pork (sausages), salmon (steaks with lemon and chilli), portobello mushrooms (with garlic and olive oil) and onion rings.  And so we did.

Something else I felt like eating on a sunny spring day, though, was sweetcorn fritters -- served just warm on a bed of rocket salad with a spicy tomato salsa, maybe with a bit of cheese thrown in.  So I put these together just before leaving home, popped them on a plate, covered it in foil and took them with me, still warm, on the bus to J's place.  The savoury scents wafting from under the foil attracted some envious glances from my fellow bus passengers!  They reheated nicely on the BBQ and were just what I wanted them to be.

Making fritters is simple in theory: make batter, add things to it, fry in pan.  When I did my usual Google-around to get a rough idea of the right proportion of ingredients to use, I found an amazing range and lack of agreement: anything between 30g to 175g of flour and 1/4 cup to 1 cup of corn kernels per egg, never mind milk/water or any of the other optional extras.  Paradoxically, this made me take heart: corn fritters are obviously a very forgiving recipe!  The quantities I used seemed to work just fine, in any case.  Here they are.

Sweetcorn and red pepper fritters
1 cup plain flour
3 tsp baking powder
salt & freshly ground black pepper
2 eggs
1/2 cup fizzy water


1 can (~400g) sweetcorn kernels, drained
1 small red pepper, finely chopped (about 1 cup total)
2 spring onions, finely chopped
good handful grated cheese (about 3/4 cup)
dash sweet chilli sauce

Sift together dry ingredients (or if you are like me and can't find your sifter, dump everything in bowl and stir with a whisk to mix and get rid of lumps).  Add eggs and water, whisk quickly and lightly to form a smooth(ish) batter.  Stir in all other ingredients.

Drop scant spoonfuls of the mixture into a lightly greased, heated, preferably non-stick pan set on medium heat, remembering to allow room for them to spread a bit or you may end up with one big fritter!  Cook until browned on one side (bubbles may appear in the batter but don't count on it), flip and cook the other side.  Rinse (not literally!) and repeat.

Serve with rocket salad and spicy tomato salsa, or however you like.

Makes... a good plateful, I forgot to count before we ate them!  Probably about 2 dozen?

Lemon syrup cupcakes, emulsions, chocolate mayonnaise cake and why it doesn't matter too much if you don't beat the eggs in gradually

Like many young cooks, I started my kitchen endeavours with cake.  From the age of about 10, I learned to cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs, fold in flour and milk and put the whole sloppy mixture into the oven, to re-emerge miraculously some time later in cake form.  I created numerous variations in shape, size and flavour -- some of them even deliberate! 

In some ways, it makes sense to start with cake.  Almost all kids like to eat cake, so there is an immediate incentive to learn to cook.  Plus simple cake recipes are hard to botch completely: anything with that much butter and sugar in it is probably going to be edible (especially to a proud first-time cook and her parents)!  On the other hand, though, making cake remains one of the most complicated exercises in physical chemistry that you are likely to find in a modern home kitchen (the likes of Heston Blumenthal and Modernist Cuisine not generally being home kitchen material).

As a young and impatient cook, I interpreted instructions such as "cream butter and sugar together until fluffy" to mean "mix until you don't see any sugar in the bowl", and as for "beat eggs in a separate bowl and add a little at a time, beating thoroughly until each addition is incorporated", that became "beat eggs, pour into mixture while beating with other hand".  The sight of curds of butter-sugar mix floating in a sea of beaten egg was a recurring theme, and actually for a long time was how I thought the mixture was meant to look at that stage.  And, you know, my results weren't too bad: they tasted and looked just fine.


So, what's the big deal with adding the egg a little at a time and beating thoroughly, rather than all-at-once and just mixing it in any-old-how?  As I understand it, by adding the egg gradually to the butter, you supposedly create an emulsion in which tiny micro-droplets of egg are dispersed in a butter-sugar mixture.  When you add the flour, instead of mixing directly with the egg, releasing gluten and potentially becoming tough, and forming large clumps, each bit of flour first becomes coated with the butter, staying tender and forming small delicate crumbs. 

The first recipe for which I ever did the creaming-emulsifying thing properly was a lemon syrup cake.  Maybe because it had more sugar than usual and hence needed more beating to incorporate the sugar into the butter, resulting in a lighter butter-sugar mix (the point of creaming, in fact) which was then easier to beat the egg into bit by bit; maybe because it was a warm day and that made the butter easier to beat; who knows.  In any case, my efforts were rewarded with a lovely smooth-looking batter rather than my usual slightly lumpy mixture, and the cake did indeed have a much finer texture with a small, tender crumb. 

And where does chocolate mayonnaise cake come in, then?  Well, the method of beating the egg gradually into the butter to create an emulsion is just like mayonnaise (also an emulsion), only the other way round -- to make mayonnaise, you beat eggs and then drizzle in the oil.  At some point, a clever cook observed that the basic ingredients of mayonnaise (eggs and fat -- I recommend avoiding the ones with mustard in, for cake-making purposes!  Mustard cake?  Eww.) were the same as the basic ingredients for cake, and now there are quite a few recipes out there for mayonnaise cakes -- most of them chocolate mayonnaise cakes, maybe because the chocolate helps to conceal any lingering vinegar or other mayonnaisey-non-cakey flavours.

But wait.  Emulsions fall into two categories, as I learnt in Year 12 chemistry: O/W (oil in water) and W/O (water in oil).  In a cake, you beat eggs (the 'water') component into butter (the 'oil' component), and this results in little drops of egg in a butter sea: a W/O emulsion.  But in mayonnaise, you beat the oil into the egg, which results in an O/W emulsion: drops of fat in a sea of egg.  This sounds more like my early baking attempts, and moreover would not (I hypothesise) have the same fat-coating-flour effect.  So why does chocolate mayonnaise cake work?  What's going on here?

Google reveals that surprisingly enough, the differing chemical properties of O/W and W/O emulsions aren't high on the list of 'commonly-discussed topics for food blogs'.  It does, however, also reveal that whether a mixture forms an O/W or a W/O emulsion isn't as simple as which component you beat into what: it also depends on the type of emulsifier and how much.  So maybe my theory about butter-coated grains of flour is just waaaay off.  Or maybe it doesn't matter too much what sort of emulsion it is, as long as the individual bubbles are small enough to produce an overall homogeneous mixture.  The other thing that the cake-batter emulsion apparently contains is tiny air bubbles, which are stabilised by the fat particles and presumably help the cake rise as well as give it texture.

Either way, although the lemon syrup cake recipe is very good, my childish baking attempts weren't really that bad either.  Maybe the lesson is that cake is never wrong.

(Oh yeah.  Chocolate mayonnaise cake?  I've never made one.  But the internet can't be wrong... can it?)

Lemon Syrup Cake
125g butter, at (preferably warm) room temperature
zest from 2 lemons
1 cup white sugar (caster is good but I've used regular too)
2 eggs, also at room temperature
3/4 cup SR flour
3/4 cup plain flour
1/2 cup milk
juice of 1 lemon

For syrup:
1/4 cup sugar
juice of the other lemon

Cream butter, sugar and lemon zest together until (yup, you guessed it) fluffy.  Beat in eggs a little at a time (I crack the egg right into the bowl but only incorporate a little at a time in my beating) to form a smooth emulsion (W/O? O/W? Who cares, it works.)  Fold in flour by the 1/2 cup alternately with milk by the 1/4 cup, so that you start and finish with flour.  Lightly mix in the lemon juice.

Pour into whatever shape tin you like -- I used to make this as a loaf most of the time, but it also makes fantastic tiny madeleines, and tonight I made cupcakes -- and bake at an appropriate temperature for the right amount of time...

I know, I know, that sounds obtuse.  But larger volumes require longer, slower cooking so that the inside has time to cook, whereas small volumes can cook faster and hotter.  As a rough guide, I used to bake a loaf cake at 160C fan-forced for about an hour 10 minutes; the cupcakes worked well at 175C equivalent (my current oven cooks quite a bit under-temperature, so I think its 190C is about 175C) for 35 minutes.  Test for doneness the usual way, by pressing the top and checking that it springs back and doesn't squidge, by inserting a toothpick or skewer into the middle and checking for raw batter stuck to it when you pull it out (don't worry about making a hole; you're going to do that later anyway), and/or by looking to see if the cake has pulled away from the sides slightly.

While the cake cooks, make the syrup by mixing the lemon juice and sugar and zapping it in the microwave, stirring frequently, until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture looks sticky.  When the cake is done, let it cool for a few minutes, then poke holes in it and spoon syrup all over it while still in the tin.  Let cool completely, coating a few more times with remaining syrup to get a nice glaze.

I like to put some thin strands of lemon zest into the syrup and then decorate the top of the cake(s) with them.

Hello world!

After more years than I care to count (or admit) of culinary curiosity -- of tasting, testing, cooking, sampling, experimenting, exploring and enjoying food -- I have finally taken the plunge and started a food blog.  I would say I have been inspired by the blooming in recent years of the blogosphere and the flourishing phenomenon of the successful amateur food blogger, but in truth my motivation is far less ambitious (thankfully!) and somewhat selfish: there are so many food blogs I've started reading regularly and so many recipes I've flagged to try out, that my browser is starting to struggle under the weight of the sheer number of tabs I keep open.  (Bookmarks?  Who needs them?!) 

So I've started this to keep track of blogs I like, recipes I want to try, and occasionally (but I make no promises) my own continuing adventures in the world of food.  Let's see what happens...